OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Don't Tell Me The Cybersecurity Moon Is Shining... (Cybersecurity Show And Tell)
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

"Show, don't tell" has become the literary commandment for any writer. It applies to all forms of fiction, and to non-fiction, including scientific writing, where it lies at the heart of many scientific communication and storytelling approaches. In this paper, I discuss how "show \emph{and} tell" is actually often the best approach when one wants to present, teach or explain complicated ideas such as those underlying notions and results in mathematics and science, and in particular in cybersecurity. I discuss how different kinds of artworks can be used to explain cybersecurity and I illustrate how telling (i.e., explaining notions in a formal, technical way) can be paired with showing through visual storytelling or other forms of storytelling. I also discuss four categories of artworks and the explanations they help provide.
Hierarchical Hybrid Error Correction for Time-Sensitive Devices at the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Computational storage, known as a solution to significantly reduce the latency by moving data-processing down to the data storage, has received wide attention because of its potential to accelerate data-driven devices at the edge. To meet the insatiable appetite for complicated functionalities tailored for intelligent devices such as autonomous vehicles, properties including heterogeneity, scalability, and flexibility are becoming increasingly important. Based on our prior work on hierarchical erasure coding that enables scalability and flexibility in cloud storage, we develop an efficient decoding algorithm that corrects a mixture of errors and erasures simultaneously. We first extract the basic component code, the so-called extended Cauchy (EC) codes, of the proposed coding solution. We prove that the class of EC codes is strictly larger than that of relevant codes with known explicit decoding algorithms. Motivated by this finding, we then develop an efficient decoding method for the general class of EC codes, based on which we propose the local and global decoding algorithms for the hierarchical codes. Our proposed hybrid error correction not only enables the usage of hierarchical codes in computational storage at the edge, but also applies to any Cauchy-like codes and allows potentially wider applications of the EC codes.
ConDA: Continual Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Domain Adaptation (DA) techniques are important for overcoming the domain shift between the source domain used for training and the target domain where testing takes place. However, current DA methods assume that the entire target domain is available during adaptation, which may not hold in practice. This paper considers a more realistic scenario, where target data become available in smaller batches and adaptation on the entire target domain is not feasible. In our work, we introduce a new, data-constrained DA paradigm where unlabeled target samples are received in batches and adaptation is performed continually. We propose a novel source-free method for continual unsupervised domain adaptation that utilizes a buffer for selective replay of previously seen samples. In our continual DA framework, we selectively mix samples from incoming batches with data stored in a buffer using buffer management strategies and use the combination to incrementally update our model. We evaluate the classification performance of the continual DA approach with state-of-the-art DA methods based on the entire target domain. Our results on three popular DA datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms many existing state-of-the-art DA methods with access to the entire target domain during adaptation.
Multi-Agent Algorithms for Collective Behavior: A structural and application-focused atlas
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

The goal of this paper is to provide a survey and application-focused atlas of collective behavior coordination algorithms for multi-agent systems. We survey the general family of collective behavior algorithms for multi-agent systems and classify them according to their underlying mathematical structure. In doing so, we aim to capture fundamental mathematical properties of algorithms (e.g., scalability with respect to the number of agents and bandwidth use) and to show how the same algorithm or family of algorithms can be used for multiple tasks and applications. Collectively, this paper provides an application-focused atlas of algorithms for collective behavior of multi-agent systems, with three objectives: 1. to act as a tutorial guide to practitioners in the selection of coordination algorithms for a given application; 2. to highlight how mathematically similar algorithms can be used for a variety of tasks, ranging from low-level control to high-level coordination; 3. to explore the state-of-the-art in the field of control of multi-agent systems and identify areas for future research.
Compacting Deep Neural Networks for Internet of Things: Methods and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown great success in completing complex tasks. However, DNNs inevitably bring high computational cost and storage consumption due to the complexity of hierarchical structures, thereby hindering their wide deployment in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, which have limited computational capability and storage capacity. Therefore, it is a necessity to investigate the technologies to compact DNNs. Despite tremendous advances in compacting DNNs, few surveys summarize compacting-DNNs technologies, especially for IoT applications. Hence, this paper presents a comprehensive study on compacting-DNNs technologies. We categorize compacting-DNNs technologies into three major types: 1) network model compression, 2) Knowledge Distillation (KD), 3) modification of network structures. We also elaborate on the diversity of these approaches and make side-by-side comparisons. Moreover, we discuss the applications of compacted DNNs in various IoT applications and outline future directions.
Exploring The Effect of High-frequency Components in GANs Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have the ability to generate images that are visually indistinguishable from real images. However, recent studies have revealed that generated and real images share significant differences in the frequency domain. In this paper, we explore the effect of high-frequency components in GANs training. According to our observation, during the training of most GANs, severe high-frequency differences make the discriminator focus on high-frequency components excessively, which hinders the generator from fitting the low-frequency components that are important for learning images' content. Then, we propose two simple yet effective frequency operations for eliminating the side effects caused by high-frequency differences in GANs training: High-Frequency Confusion (HFC) and High-Frequency Filter (HFF). The proposed operations are general and can be applied to most existing GANs with a fraction of the cost. The advanced performance of the proposed operations is verified on multiple loss functions, network architectures, and datasets. Specifically, the proposed HFF achieves significant improvements of $42.5\%$ FID on CelebA (128*128) unconditional generation based on SNGAN, $30.2\%$ FID on CelebA unconditional generation based on SSGAN, and $69.3\%$ FID on CelebA unconditional generation based on InfoMAXGAN.
Adaptive Feature Fusion Network for Gaze Tracking in Mobile Tablets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, many multi-stream gaze estimation methods have been proposed. They estimate gaze from eye and face appearances and achieve reasonable accuracy. However, most of the methods simply concatenate the features extracted from eye and face appearance. The feature fusion process has been ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Feature Fusion Network (AFF-Net), which performs gaze tracking task in mobile tablets. We stack two-eye feature maps and utilize Squeeze-and-Excitation layers to adaptively fuse two-eye features according to their similarity on appearance. Meanwhile, we also propose Adaptive Group Normalization to recalibrate eye features with the guidance of facial feature. Extensive experiments on both GazeCapture and MPIIFaceGaze datasets demonstrate consistently superior performance of the proposed method.
Let's Ask Students About Their Programs, Automatically
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Students sometimes produce code that works but that its author does not comprehend. For example, a student may apply a poorly-understood code template, stumble upon a working solution through trial and error, or plagiarize. Similarly, passing an automated functional assessment does not guarantee that the student understands their code. One way to tackle these issues is to probe students' comprehension by asking them questions about their own programs. We propose an approach to automatically generate questions about student-written program code. We moreover propose a use case for such questions in the context of automatic assessment systems: after a student's program passes unit tests, the system poses questions to the student about the code. We suggest that these questions can enhance assessment systems, deepen student learning by acting as self-explanation prompts, and provide a window into students' program comprehension. This discussion paper sets an agenda for future technical development and empirical research on the topic.
Overprotective Training Environments Fall Short at Testing Time: Let Models Contribute to Their Own Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Despite important progress, conversational systems often generate dialogues that sound unnatural to humans. We conjecture that the reason lies in their different training and testing conditions: agents are trained in a controlled "lab" setting but tested in the "wild". During training, they learn to generate an utterance given the human dialogue history. On the other hand, during testing, they must interact with each other, and hence deal with noisy data. We propose to fill this gap by training the model with mixed batches containing both samples of human and machine-generated dialogues. We assess the validity of the proposed method on GuessWhat?!, a visual referential game.
Low Dimensional Landscape Hypothesis is True: DNNs can be Trained in Tiny Subspaces
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep neural networks (DNNs) usually contain massive parameters, but there is redundancy such that it is guessed that the DNNs could be trained in low-dimensional subspaces. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Linear Dimensionality Reduction (DLDR) based on low-dimensional properties of the training trajectory. The reduction is efficient, which is supported by comprehensive experiments: optimization in 40 dimensional spaces can achieve comparable performance as regular training over thousands or even millions of parameters. Since there are only a few optimization variables, we develop a quasi-Newton-based algorithm and also obtain robustness against label noises, which are two follow-up experiments to show the advantages of finding low-dimensional subspaces.
FEniCS-preCICE: Coupling FEniCS to other Simulation Software
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2021
Year: 2021

The new software FEniCS-preCICE is a middle software layer, sitting in between the existing finite-element library FEniCS and the coupling library preCICE. The middle layer simplifies coupling (existing) FEniCS application codes to other simulation software via preCICE. To this end, FEniCS-preCICE converts between FEniCS and preCICE mesh and data structures, provides easy-to-use coupling conditions, and manages data checkpointing for implicit coupling. The new software is a library itself and follows a FEniCS-native style. Only a few lines of additional code are necessary to prepare a FEniCS application code for coupling. We illustrate the functionality of FEniCS-preCICE by two examples: a FEniCS heat conduction code coupled to OpenFOAM and a FEniCS linear elasticity code coupled to SU2. The results of both scenarios are compared with other simulation software showing good agreement.
Joint Analog Beam Selection and Digital Beamforming in Millimeter Wave Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Cell-free massive MIMO systems consist of many distributed access points with simple components that jointly serve the users. In millimeter wave bands, only a limited set of predetermined beams can be supported. In a network that consolidates these technologies, downlink analog beam selection stands as a challenging task for the network sum-rate maximization. Low-cost digital filters can improve the network sum-rate further. In this work, we propose low-cost joint designs of analog beam selection and digital filters. The proposed joint designs achieve significantly higher sum-rates than the disjoint design benchmark. Supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms can efficiently approximate the input-output mapping functions of the beam selection decisions of the joint designs with low computational complexities. Since the training of ML algorithms is performed off-line, we propose a well-constructed joint design that combines multiple initializations, iterations, and selection features, as well as beam conflict control, i.e., the same beam cannot be used for multiple users. The numerical results indicate that ML algorithms can retain 99-100% of the original sum-rate results achieved by the proposed well-constructed designs.
Efficient Global Optimization of Non-differentiable, Symmetric Objectives for Multi Camera Placement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a novel iterative method for optimally placing and orienting multiple cameras in a 3D scene. Sample applications include improving the accuracy of 3D reconstruction, maximizing the covered area for surveillance, or improving the coverage in multi-viewpoint pedestrian tracking. Our algorithm is based on a block-coordinate ascent combined with a surrogate function and an exclusion area technique. This allows to flexibly handle difficult objective functions that are often expensive and quantized or non-differentiable. The solver is globally convergent and easily parallelizable. We show how to accelerate the optimization by exploiting special properties of the objective function, such as symmetry. Additionally, we discuss the trade-off between non-optimal stationary points and the cost reduction when optimizing the viewpoints consecutively.
Nonlinear RF Fingerprints Authentication for OFDM Wireless Devices based on Demodulated Symbols
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Radio Frequency fingerprints (RFF) authentication is one of the methods for the physical-layer information security, which uses the hardware characteristics of the transmitter to identify its real identity. In order to improve the performance of RFF based on preamble with fixed duration, a nonlinear RFF authentication method based on payload symbols is proposed for the wireless OFDM devices with the bit mapping scheme of QPSK. The communication system is modeled as a Hammerstein system containing the nonlinear transmitter and wireless multipath fading channel. A parameter separation technique based on orthogonal polynomial is presented for the estimation of the parameters of the Hammerstein system. The Hammerstein system parameter separation technique is firstly used to estimate the linear parameter with the training signal, which is used to compensate the adverse effect of the linear channel for the demodulation of the successive payload symbols. The demodulated payload symbols are further used to estimate the nonlinear coefficients of the transmitter with the Hammerstein system parameter separation technique again, which is used as the novel RFF for the authentication of the QPSK-OFDM devices. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is feasible. The novel method can also be extended to the OFDM signals with other bit mapping schemes.
NameRec*: Highly Accurate and Fine-grained Person Name Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we introduce the NameRec* task, which aims to do highly accurate and fine-grained person name recognition. Traditional Named Entity Recognition models have good performance in recognising well-formed person names from text with consistent and complete syntax, such as news articles. However, there are rapidly growing scenarios where sentences are of incomplete syntax and names are in various forms such as user-generated contents and academic homepages. To address person name recognition in this context, we propose a fine-grained annotation scheme based on anthroponymy. To take full advantage of the fine-grained annotations, we propose a Co-guided Neural Network (CogNN) for person name recognition. CogNN fully explores the intra-sentence context and rich training signals of name forms. To better utilize the inter-sentence context and implicit relations, which are extremely essential for recognizing person names in long documents, we further propose an Inter-sentence BERT Model (IsBERT). IsBERT has an overlapped input processor, and an inter-sentence encoder with bidirectional overlapped contextual embedding learning and multi-hop inference mechanisms. To derive benefit from different documents with a diverse abundance of context, we propose an advanced Adaptive Inter-sentence BERT Model (Ada-IsBERT) to dynamically adjust the inter-sentence overlapping ratio to different documents. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods on both academic homepages and news articles.
Schrödinger's Ballot: Quantum Information and the Violation of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper we study Arrow's Impossibility Theorem in the quantum setting. Our work is based on the work of Bao and Halpern, in which it is proved that the quantum analogue of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is not valid. However, we feel unsatisfied about the proof presented there. Moreover, the definition of Quantum Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (QIIA) seems not appropriate to us. In this paper, we give a better definition of QIIA, which properly captures the idea of the independence of irrelevant alternatives, and a detailed proof of the violation of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem in the quantum setting with the modified definition.
Mining API Interactions to Analyze Software Revisions for the Evolution of Energy Consumption
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

With the widespread use and adoption of mobile platforms like Android a new software quality concern has emerged -- energy consumption. However, developing energy-efficient software and applications requires knowledge and likewise proper tooling to support mobile developers. To this aim, we present an approach to examine the energy evolution of software revisions based on their API interactions. The approach stems from the assumption that the utilization of an API has direct implications on the energy being consumed during runtime. Based on an empirical evaluation, we show initial results that API interactions serve as a flexible, lightweight, and effective way to compare software revisions regarding their energy evolution. Given our initial results we envision that in future using our approach mobile developers will be able to gain insights on the energy implications of changes in source code in the course of the software development life-cycle.
Multi-level Metric Learning for Few-shot Image Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Few-shot learning is devoted to training a model on few samples. Most of these approaches learn a model based on a pixel-level or global-level feature representation. However, using global features may lose local information, and using pixel-level features may lose the contextual semantics of the image. Moreover, such works can only measure the relations between them on a single level, which is not comprehensive and effective. And if query images can simultaneously be well classified via three distinct level similarity metrics, the query images within a class can be more tightly distributed in a smaller feature space, generating more discriminative feature maps. Motivated by this, we propose a novel Part-level Embedding Adaptation with Graph (PEAG) method to generate task-specific features. Moreover, a Multi-level Metric Learning (MML) method is proposed, which not only calculates the pixel-level similarity but also considers the similarity of part-level features and global-level features. Extensive experiments on popular few-shot image recognition datasets prove the effectiveness of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/chenhaoxing/M2L}.
Multi-view analysis of unregistered medical images using cross-view transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-view medical image analysis often depends on the combination of information from multiple views. However, differences in perspective or other forms of misalignment can make it difficult to combine views effectively, as registration is not always possible. Without registration, views can only be combined at a global feature level, by joining feature vectors after global pooling. We present a novel cross-view transformer method to transfer information between unregistered views at the level of spatial feature maps. We demonstrate this method on multi-view mammography and chest X-ray datasets. On both datasets, we find that a cross-view transformer that links spatial feature maps can outperform a baseline model that joins feature vectors after global pooling.
L3CubeMahaSent: A Marathi Tweet-based Sentiment Analysis Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Sentiment analysis is one of the most fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing. Popular languages like English, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, and also Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil have seen a significant amount of work in this area. However, the Marathi language which is the third most popular language in India still lags behind due to the absence of proper datasets. In this paper, we present the first major publicly available Marathi Sentiment Analysis Dataset - L3CubeMahaSent. It is curated using tweets extracted from various Maharashtrian personalities' Twitter accounts. Our dataset consists of ~16,000 distinct tweets classified in three broad classes viz. positive, negative, and neutral. We also present the guidelines using which we annotated the tweets. Finally, we present the statistics of our dataset and baseline classification results using CNN, LSTM, ULMFiT, and BERT-based deep learning models.
Traffic Camera Calibration via Vehicle Vanishing Point Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper we propose a traffic surveillance camera calibration method based on detection of pairs of vanishing points associated with vehicles in the traffic surveillance footage. To detect the vanishing points we propose a CNN which outputs heatmaps in which the positions of vanishing points are represented using the diamond space parametrization which enables us to detect vanishing points from the whole infinite projective space. From the detected pairs of vanishing points for multiple vehicles in a scene we establish the scene geometry by estimating the focal length of the camera and the orientation of the road plane. We show that our method achieves competitive results on the BrnoCarPark dataset while having fewer requirements than the current state of the art approach.